Application of Augmented Reality (AR) in HIV Self-test in Men Who Have Sex With Men Community

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Status: Not yet enrolling

Conditions: Hiv

Treatments: Other: Augmented reality

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05781165

MSS346R

Details and patient eligibility

About

Objective: To apply augmented reality (AR) technology in HIV self-test and to assess its impacts in enhancing testing performance among men who have sex with men (MSM).

Design: Parallel randomised controlled, open label, trial. Block randomisation with a block size of 4 would be used to allocate the study arms.

Participants: men who have sex with men in Hong Kong

Intervention: Self-test assisted by AR vs self-test with instruction sheets

Main outcome measures: Effectiveness, usability, learnability, efficiency and satisfaction scores; rate of completion and result upload; acceptability of AR approach in assisting self-test

Anticipated results: 200 MSM would be recruited with 50 and 150 in control and intervention group, respectively. The scores in the intervention group are 10% higher than the control group. Proportion of satisfied participants in the intervention group is 10% more than the control group. AR approach is feasible and acceptable to MSM for assisting in HIV self-test.

Full description

About 200 MSM would be recruited through community-based organisations and Internet channels where MSM socialise and seek partners. Fifty and 150 participants would be randomly assigned into the control and intervention group by block randomisation with a block size of 4, respectively. After giving informed consent, subjects would be invited to complete an online questionnaire and request for an HIV self-test kit in the online portal before randomisation. Participants in the control group would be given a standard commercially available self-test kit which included bilingual instruction sheets. Subjects in the intervention arm would be asked to use the AR element to assist the same standard commercially available self-test kit. All participants would be asked to upload the test result and complete a post-test questionnaire on the usability of the test and the AR approach. The result would be validated by an experienced research staff. Subjects with a positive result would be contacted for follow up. Main outcome measures in this study would include the confidence in performing the self-test and the usability of HIV self-testing between the two arms.

Enrollment: 200 estimated patients

Sex: Male

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Adult men who have sex with men
• Has access to a smartphone with internet access

Exclusion criteria

• Unable to communicate in written Chinese or English
• Unable to give informed consent

Trial design

Primary purpose: Screening

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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200 participants in 2 patient groups

Intervention

Experimental group

Description:

Participants in the intervention arm will be able to access the augmented reality page in the web app to perform the HIV self-test

Treatment:

Other: Augmented reality

Control

No Intervention group

Description:

Participants in the control arm will be asked to follow the instruction sheet to perform the HIV self-test